


Birthday Cake

by likethenight



Series: Writers' Month 2020 [15]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Baking, Birthday Cake, Cake, Children, Cooking, Cute Kids, Fluff, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:08:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25958002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: Natalie wants to bake her dad a birthday cake. Jack, slightly bewildered by the whole concept, helps out.Ficlet written for Writers' Month day 17, prompt "cooking".
Relationships: Hal Peacock (Original Character)/Jack Outlaw | Jack McQueen (Original Character), Jack Outlaw | Jack McQueen (Original Character) & Natalie Peacock (Original Character), Original Female Character & Original Male Character, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Writers' Month 2020 [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1867720
Collections: Writer's Month 2020





	Birthday Cake

**Author's Note:**

> Hal and Jack are the main characters from a novel I've been writing for a very long time entitled Two of a Kind. They are both ex-street-kid musicians who spend the course of the novel very slowly realising that they are actually everything in the world to each other (they are the archetypal slow-burn idiots in love). Hal has a daughter, Natalie, who lives with her mother Anita. Jack is - well. Jack is hard to explain but he is very damaged, very unsocialised, somewhat feral, and also incredibly grumpy; meanwhile Hal is much calmer, but still rather damaged. They each play guitar in bands, Hal in one and Jack in another. By the point that this ficlet takes place, they have been living together in an established relationship for some time, and Hal has been helping Jack adjust to dealing with people, something at which Jack has never had much experience, for various reasons. Part of this has involved finagling Jack into taking Natalie to the crochet club hosted by Hal's grandmother, at which all Hal's grandmother's friends promptly adopted Jack as an honorary grandson, much to his bewilderment (and the author's amusement).

“Papa,” says the kid one afternoon, “will you help me make a cake?”

Hal is out at rehearsal, otherwise I’d suggest she asks him - no, wait, he’s a disaster in the kitchen. I’ll have to do it. But first - is it really absolutely necessary? I give her a look. “Why?”

She rolls her eyes. “Because it’s daddy’s birthday tomorrow and I want to make him a birthday cake.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t forgotten his birthday, but the concept of a birthday cake hadn’t quite occurred to me.

“Yes,” she says. “I thought we could make him one in a shape, like maybe a guitar, but then I thought that might be a bit complicated.”

“Too right,” I nod. “Do you know how to make a cake?” Theoretically I can cook, but I’ve never needed to learn how to bake, and so I haven’t.

“We can find a recipe on the internet,” she says. “And I suppose we’ll have to go shopping for the ingredients. And the decorations.”

Of course there will have to be decorations. “All right. And probably a tin to bake it in, because I don’t have any of those.”

“Oh yes, and a tin!” The kid bounces up and down, and I resign myself to an afternoon of shopping and cake baking. Well, it’s not like I was doing anything else. I haven’t any idea what sort of cake Hal likes, but the kid thinks something called a lemon sponge will make him happy, so all right, lemon sponge it is.

We end up having to get the bus to the big supermarket because the little one across the street from the flat doesn’t have half the things we need, which is how I find myself wandering around a giant retail barn with the most butterfly-minded kid in the world (her father would take the title but he’s technically a grown-up so he’s disqualified), looking for things like flour, and eggs, and icing sugar, and sprinkles, whatever the fuck they are, and food colouring (you can colour food?), and about a million and one other things. She spends the most time in the aisle with the decorations, picking this thing and that thing and plunking them in the shopping basket until I point out that there won’t be room on the cake for all of it. 

“What about candles?” she asks, and I frown, confused.

“Candles? What for?” I’m having visions of those tall candles they have on tables in posh restaurants, but the kid giggles and reaches up to bring down a little packet with some tiny little ones in it.

“You have to have candles on a birthday cake, silly! You have as many as how old you are, and if you blow them all out at once you get to make a wish.”

All right, it’s not the strangest thing I’ve ever heard, but it’s up there. People are _weird_. “I don’t think your dad will thank you if you put that many candles on there. He’s trying to pretend he isn’t getting any older.” Hal isn’t having a significant birthday with a zero on the end, but he’s still been grousing a little bit about feeling old. I’ve been taking the piss quite remorselessly, because I am two years younger than he is and I _can_.

“All right,” she says, “let’s just get this packet, and he can have a few as a rep-re-sen-ta-tion.” She sounds the word out, and I wonder to myself where she got it from; she’s a bright spark, this kid.

So we get the candles, and once I’ve reassured myself we’ve got everything we need, we head off to the checkout. I’m getting quite good at being polite to checkout staff these days, but it’s easier when I’m with the kid because she does the talking. I mean, people give me funny looks when I’m out with her, because she’s a disgustingly cute kid and I’m a scruffy, spiky, disreputable-looking punk rocker, but I don’t really give a shit what anyone else thinks.

The lady behind the till we go to is quite elderly-looking - not as old as Hal’s grandma and her crochet mafia, but kind of grandma-looking, and she clucks at the kid and smiles.

“Are you and your daddy making a cake?” she asks, and the kid giggles.

“This isn’t my daddy. This is my papa, and we’re making a birthday cake for my daddy. It’s his birthday tomorrow.”

To her credit, the checkout lady only does a tiny double-take. “Oh, well then. It looks like it’s going to be the best-decorated cake in town.”

“Don’t,” I mutter, “there’s no way all of that is going to fit on,” and the kid and the lady both give me a look.

“Of course it is, papa,” says the kid in her best ‘you know nothing, papa’ voice, and the checkout lady giggles. 

“I’m sure you’ll give it your best shot, won’t you, dear?” she says as she finishes scanning the stuff, and I pay for everything while the kid rattles off her plans for the cake.

“Come on, kid,” I tell her, “say thank you to the nice lady and let her get on with her day, yeah?”

“Oh yes,” says the kid, “thank you!”

“Good luck with the cake,” says the checkout lady, and somehow I think we’ll need it.

The kid chatters about the cake all the way home, and by the time we get there I feel like we’ve already made it about ten times over. But no, we still have to actually make the sodding thing, and so we get going, the kid on the little step I got her so she can reach the counters. Everything has to be weighed out, and then there’s mixing and adding and mixing and faffing, and then we get it poured into the tin and into the oven. I squint at the recipe on my phone, says it needs half an hour, so okay, that gives us chance to sit down and be quiet for a bit. I set the timer, and prepare to teach the kid a lesson in patience.

That goes about as well as could be expected, and she’s jumping up every two minutes to look at the oven. She wants to open it, but I point out that letting cold air in might make the cake not rise properly, so that’s that dealt with, but she’s still checking the sodding thing every two minutes until I make her come and sit down with me on the sofa and tell me a story. Never fails.

She’s midway through explaining to me why the Three Bears didn’t just lock their front door like sensible crime-conscious citizens when the timer beeps and we can finally go and check on the cake. The recipe says to check it with a skewer, which I don’t have, but I do have a knife so I use that instead, and none of the mixture sticks to it so I guess it’s done. I don’t have a cooling rack either - should’ve read the equipment requirements as well as the ingredients list before we left the supermarket - so I turn the thing out onto a plate and hope that will do. 

“How long before we can decorate it, papa?” the kid wants to know, and I sigh. 

“I’ve no idea, kid. It needs to cool first, otherwise the icing will melt, and you don’t want that, do you?”

“I suppose not,” she says, looking disappointed, and I have a feeling that the only reason she suggested this whole performance was so that she could play with the decorations.

Of course, the kid fails the second lesson in patience with flying colours, too; she’s up and down every two minutes feeling the cake to see if it’s cooled down enough yet. No matter that I tell her it’ll be half an hour or so, because apparently even though I’m the one with the cooking experience here, she seems to think she knows better than I do.

Still, eventually it’s cool enough, so I supervise her making the icing, in pink, of course - cue clouds of icing sugar every-fucking-where - and then once she’s poured it on we move on to the very important business of decoration. The kid lines up all the pots of different things that she had me buy, and spends a little while deliberating. There are sprinkles - I still have no idea what the fuck those are - and little silver ball things, rice-paper unicorns in rainbow colours, little coloured sugar hearts and stars, edible glitter…

“There’s no way you’ll be able to fit all that on there,” I point out, and she giggles.

“Don’t be silly, papa, we won’t put the whole things on. Just some. But I don’t know whether to make patterns, or sprinkle it all on randomly.”

I snort. “You know your father. Random sounds about right.”

Another giggle. “Oh, you’re right, papa! All right then.” And she opens each of the pots and one by one sprinkles some of the contents over the cake until it looks more or less exactly like Hal used to when I first knew him - like an explosion in Claire’s Accessories. I have to bite back the snort of laughter that wants to escape me, don’t want to upset the kid, after all.

The candles go on last, and then she declares it done, and all we have to do is wait for her dad to come home and we can all eat it.

Which he does, eventually, and the look on his face when he realises that we’ve baked him a cake together is worth all the absolute fucking weirdness. Well, it usually is, when the kid and I have done anything together. For some reason it seems to mean the world to him that I get on well with her, and yeah, y’know, I guess that’s important to me. 

I light the candles with my Zippo, and Hal blows them all out in one go, the kid cheering and telling him he has to make a wish, but apparently he can’t tell anyone what it is or it won’t come true. So he pulls a suitably considering face, and then when he’s apparently thought of something we cut the cake and each have a slice. 

It’s surprisingly not bad. Not a patch on the cakes from the crochet mafia, but then they’ve all had about a hundred years of practice and this is our first attempt, so that’s only to be expected - but it’s not bad. Hal pronounces himself satisfied, the kid curls up in his lap, and I lean against his shoulder, feeling oddly accomplished.

“Four candles?” he murmurs later, after the kid’s gone to sleep in his lap.

I roll my eyes. “Apparently you’re supposed to have the same number of candles as the age you’re turning. I said you probably wouldn’t appreciate that many, and besides we didn’t want to set the cake on fire. So we just got one packet.”

Hal snorts and elbows me, but then he leans over and kisses my hair. “Thank you,” he murmurs, and I fight the urge to brush it off; still working on that.

“All part of the service,” I tell him, and then he tilts my chin up and kisses me properly, and all right, if it gets me results like this I guess I can live with the weirdness.

**Author's Note:**

> For multiple reasons relating to his upbringing, or lack thereof, Jack is unfamiliar with most traditions; in the novel, Natalie has been taking great joy in introducing him to things like animated movies, fairy tales and Christmas traditions, and here she is teaching him a lesson about birthdays. She thinks it's funny that he doesn't know about these things, but also sad, and he's actually quite enjoying playing along with her.


End file.
